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Most of the archaeological record of the Middle to Later Stone Age transition comes from southern Africa. Here, Shipton et al. describe the new site Panga ya Saidi on the coast of Kenya that covers the last 78,000 years and shows gradual cultural and technological change in the Late Pleistocene.

Genome-wide ancestry profiles of four individuals, dating to 8,000 and 3,000 years before present, from the archaeological site of Shum Laka (Cameroon) shed light on the deep population history of sub-Saharan Africa.

When the Dornier HM3 lithotriptor was introduced in the early 1980s, shock-wave lithotripsy (SWL) rapidly became the preferred treatment for most upper-tract calculi. A number of second- and third-generation machines have since become available. This Viewpoint discusses the evolution of SWL technology, and highlights concerns over the limitations of modern devices.

When modern humans colonized India is debated. Here, Clarkson and colleagues report an archaeological site in India that has been occupied for approximately 80,000 years and contains a stone tool assemblage attributed to Homo sapiens that matches artefacts from Africa, Arabia, and Australia.

Oldupai Gorge, Tanzania is a key site for understanding early human evolution. Here, the authors report a multiproxy dataset from the Western basin of Oldupai Gorge dating to 2 million years ago, enabling the in situ comparison of lithic assemblages, paleoenvironments and hominin behavioral adaptability.

Stable carbon and oxygen isotope analysis of mammal teeth associated with stone tools and cut-marked bone dated to between 300,000 and 500,000 years ago reveals that, at the time of the earliest-known hominin presence, the Arabian peninsula was home to productive grasslands similar to modern-day African savannahs.

Available enzymatic CO2 reduction strategies are not suitable for aerobic microorganisms and many industrial settings. Here, the authors design a new metabolic pathway that can operate under fully aerobic conditions, ambient CO2 levels, and seamlessly integrate with well-established C1-assimilation pathways.

A global network of researchers was formed to investigate the role of human genetics in SARS-CoV-2 infection and COVID-19 severity; this paper reports 13 genome-wide significant loci and potentially actionable mechanisms in response to infection.

Large language models are increasingly used for diverse tasks, yet we have limited insight into their understanding of chemistry. Now ChemBench—a benchmarking framework containing more than 2,700 question–answer pairs—has been developed to assess their chemical knowledge and reasoning, revealing that the best models surpass human chemists on average but struggle with some basic tasks.

Ancient DNA reveals genetic differences between stone-tool users and people associated with ceramic technology in the Caribbean and provides substantially lower estimates of population sizes in the region before European contact.

Analysis of the genomes of 50 species of Lemuriformes shows high levels of genomic diversity, likely due to allele sharing, as well as population declines and inbreeding patterns resulting from ecological factors and human impacts in Madagascar.

A climatic record from desert speleothems shows that the central Arabian interior experienced recurrent humid intervals over the past 8 million years, which likely facilitated mammalian dispersals between Africa and Eurasia.

Some large DNA viruses encode histone-like proteins similar to those in eukaryotes, which organize DNA into nucleosome-like particles. Here the authors find that Medusavirus histones form nucleosomes and arrays, but its unique linker histone H1 does not interact with chromatin. This reveals insights into how viruses organize their genetic material.

Ancient proteins in human dental calculus from sites across Mongolia spanning 5,000 years suggest dairy consumption on the eastern Eurasian steppe by circa 3000 bc, and the later emergence of horse milking at circa 1200 bc, concurrent with the first evidence for horse riding.

The earliest known human burial in Africa, that of a young child, is dated to around 78,000 years ago.

Estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR) is a measure of kidney function used to define chronic kidney disease. Here, Morris et al. perform trans-ethnic genome-wide meta-analyses for eGFR in 312,468 individuals and identify novel loci and downstream putative causal genes.

Circulating tumour DNA profiling in early-stage non-small-cell lung cancer can be used to track single-nucleotide variants in plasma to predict lung cancer relapse and identify tumour subclones involved in the metastatic process.

Anaplerotic reactions constantly refill metabolic networks with essential intermediates. This concept was adapted to enable a 54-step in vitro biosynthesis of the macrolide backbone of the antibiotic erythromycin from CO₂.

In quantum metrology (as well as computing) it is not easy to pinpoint the specific source of quantum advantage. Here, the authors reveal a link between postselection and the unusually high rates of information per final measurement in general quantum parameter-estimation scenarios.

Homo erectus adapted to hyper-arid climatic conditions one million years ago through the strategic use of rivers and ponds, and this facilitated geographic expansion within and beyond Africa, as shown by multi-proxy data from Oldupai Gorge, Tanzania.

Multiple cellular pathways are altered in cancer and identifying them is relevant for prognosis and therapy. Here, the authors develop Benchmark and Pathway Ensemble Tool (PET), two computational approaches to optimise pathway discovery in cancer and predict related biomarkers and therapeutic avenues.

How Indigenous populations in the southern tip of South America have changed over time has been unclear. Here the authors generate genome-wide data for 20 ancient individuals and examine how past migrations and admixture events correlate to geography and shifts in the archaeological record.

Here, the authors develop a deep-learning algorithm to predict biomarkers from histopathological imaging in advanced urothelial cancer patients. This method detects suitable patients for targeted therapy clinical trials with a significant reduction in molecular testing, providing cost and time savings in real-world clinical settings.

The mechanisms underlying resistance of Neisseria gonorrhoeae to the antibiotic azithromycin are incompletely understood. Here, Ma et al. conduct a conditional genome-wide association study to identify new resistance mutations and experimentally confirm that a mutation in ribosomal protein L4 confers increased resistance.

Combination of epidemiology, preclinical models and ultradeep DNA profiling of clinical cohorts unpicks the inflammatory mechanism by which air pollution promotes lung cancer

The approximately 5-Gb tuatara (Sphenodon punctatus) genome assembly provides a resource for analysing amniote evolution, and highlights the imperative for meaningful cultural engagement with Indigenous communities in genome-sequencing endeavours.

Safely opening university campuses has been a major challenge during the COVID-19 pandemic. Here, the authors describe a program of public health measures employed at a university in the United States which, combined with other non-pharmaceutical interventions, allowed the university to stay open in fall 2020 with limited evidence of transmission.

The climatic response to the 1257 Samalas eruption is unclear. Analyses of proxy data and medieval archives suggest that the eruption triggered some of the coldest summers of the past millennium, but only in some Northern Hemisphere regions.

A sequencing chemistry that separates nucleotide identification from nucleotide incorporation achieves high accuracy.

Whole-genome sequencing, transcriptome-wide association and fine-mapping analyses in over 7,000 individuals with critical COVID-19 are used to identify 16 independent variants that are associated with severe illness in COVID-19.

Response to drug therapy in colorectal cancer (CRC) patients has been associated with tumour heterogeneity. Here the authors analyse DNA copy number aberrations in primary tumours from CRC patients and identify genetic variants that influence drug response.

Familial Mediterranean fever is an autoinflammatory disease caused by gain-of-function mutations in the pyrin inflammasome. Kastner and colleagues show that mutant pyrin better resists suppression by the plague bacterium Yersinia pestis and may have been positively selected in human Middle Eastern populations.

The balancing apparatus of the inner ear relies on the mechanosensory activity of hair cells (HC), which are poorly regenerated upon loss in adult mammals. Here, the authors show that in newborn mice HC regenerate through proliferation and transdifferentiation of activated striolar supporting cells that express Lgr5.

Michael Talkowski and colleagues analyze balanced chromosomal abnormalities in 273 individuals by whole-genome sequencing. Their findings suggest that sequence-level resolution improves prediction of clinical outcomes for balanced rearrangements and provides insight into pathogenic mechanisms such as altered gene regulation due to changes in chromosome topology.

Analyses of the TRACERx study unveil the relationship between tissue morphology, the underlying evolutionary genomic landscape, and clinical and anatomical relapse risk of lung adenocarcinomas.

A longitudinal evolutionary analysis of 126 lung cancer patients with metastatic disease reveals the timing of metastatic divergence, modes of dissemination and the genomic events subject to selection during the metastatic transition.

Analyses of multiregional tumour samples from 421 patients with non-small cell lung cancer prospectively enrolled to the TRACERx study reveal determinants of tumour evolution and relationships between intratumour heterogeneity and clinical outcome.

Openshaw and colleagues find myeloid inflammation and complement activation signatures in patients with long COVID who were previously hospitalized.

In lung adenocarcinoma, antibodies against endogenous retroviruses promote anti-tumour activity, and expression of endogenous retroviruses can predict outcomes of immunotherapy.

Results of the TRACERx study shed new light into the association between body composition and body weight with survival in individuals with non-small cell lung cancer, and delineate potential biological processes and mediators contributing to the development of cancer-associated cachexia.

Measurements of subclonal expansion of ctDNA in the plasma before surgery may enable the prediction of future metastatic subclones, offering the possibility for early intervention in patients with non-small-cell lung cancer.

Computational and machine-learning approaches that integrate genomic and transcriptomic variation from paired primary and metastatic non-small cell lung cancer samples from the TRACERx cohort reveal the role of transcriptional events in tumour evolution.

Analysis of whole-genome doubling (WGD) by using cancer sequencing data combined with simulations of tumor evolution suggests that there is negative selection against homozygous loss of essential genes before WGD but not after.

RNA sequencing data and tumour pathology observations of non-small-cell lung cancers indicate that the immune cell microenvironment exerts strong evolutionary selection pressures that shape the immune-evasion capacity of tumours.